We Are All Bad Mothers Now

Is there such a thing as a good mother, in the eyes of the New York Post? It would appear, from their reading of an interview that Chirlane McCray, the First Lady of New York City, gave to New York magazine, that there is not—not in this city, not in this world. There are only bad ones, the kind who would make a “heart-wrenching confession” summed up in a banner headline:

The disclosure—bound to horrify most moms—shatters the carefully crafted image of de Blasio’s close-knit family, which helped vault him into office.

What is bound to horrify most mothers is the ease with which a woman who speaks with any honesty about her life is called a bad mother. This is what McCray said about the period after the birth of her first child, Chiara, seven months after she married de Blasio:

“I was 40 years old. I had a life. Especially with Chiara—will we feel guilt forever more? Of course, yes. But the truth is, I could not spend every day with her. I didn’t want to do that. I looked for all kinds of reason not to do it. I love her. I have thousands of photos of her—every 1-month birthday, 2-month birthday. But I’ve been working since I was 14, and that part of me is me. It took a long time for me to get into ‘I’m taking care of kids,’ and what that means.”

By the time Dante was born in 1997—the year de Blasio started working for the Clinton administration as a regional director for HUD—Chirlane had mostly assumed the role of the default parent. She stopped working full-time for several years, and even when she resumed, it was she who was usually at after-school pickup at 6 p.m. “The kids came first,” she says.

You have, then, a story of a woman who had always worked, and assumed she would when she had children. Minus a time machine, that means being away from them sometimes. She wanted to do both, to have days at the office and days of obsessive photographing of two-month birthdays, but then decided that “taking care of kids” meant that she would stop working full time “for several years.” The Post’s translation: “She was unable to embrace motherhood and initially neglected Chiara.” Apparently, even a mother who quits her job risks being called a bad mother—one who neglected her child—if she hesitates a second too long. What would the Post’s ideal have been—if McCray had lost all desire to spend any time in the office, or anywhere but with Chiara, the day her daughter was born? Maybe, by the Post’s lights, being a working mother is permissible only if one ritually expresses the wish that one’s life was different. To be anything other than a “bad mom,” must one despise work?

Perhaps, then, the key to being a good mother is self-flagellation. But not quite: any expression of regret or doubt might count as a “confession” of one’s failure to “embrace motherhood.” So maybe the Post is suggesting that, to be a good mother, one must be smug—or maybe it isn’t leaving women any good option at all.

When McCray says that she and her husband will “feel guilt forever more,” she is not admitting to something dark and awful. She is just telling a truth of parenting. One always tears oneself apart over what could have gone better—over not getting a photo of the six-week birthday, or just not being the wonder that the small person in front of you is. (There is a line in D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rainbow” that, as a parent, I’ve thought of often. It comes after Ursula, a small child, has tripped while running to meet her father, and cut her lip: “He could never bear to think of it, he always wanted to cry, even when he was an old man and she had become a stranger to him.”)

This is all particularly cruel in McCray’s case, because Chiara, who is a college student, has talked about her struggles with marijuana, drinking, and depression. She has also described how she got through them:

My mom was trying really hard to help me, just any little thing she could. I mean, my dad was doing the same, but obviously he was really busy. But, you know, they were both very emotionally committed to trying to figure out some way to get me better.

There does not seem to be a question about de Blasio’s job, or what it means, to him, to be a good father. That is a question, as it happens, that he has said he’s thought about his whole life. His father left the family when he was seven and later killed himself. Last week, when speaking about Chiara, de Blasio said, “My own father was an alcoholic. He could not, unfortunately, tragically, find his way to this kind of help, this kind of recovery. But his granddaughter could. And she did.” De Blasio’s mother worked when he was a child; de Blasio is her maiden name, which the mayor took when he became an adult. In 2005, when Dante was eight, de Blasio’s mother and McCray’s, who were both in poor health, moved into a house down the block from their children. According to New York, “It fell largely to Chirlane to coordinate ‘the grandmas’ ’care, keeping track of the coming and going of home health aides, driving them to doctors’ appointments, rushing to the emergency room as needed. It was, she remembers, one of the most difficult periods of her life.” Does the Post think that that makes her a bad daughter, too?

Photograph by John Moore/Getty.

Amy Davidson Sorkin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2014.

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